title: The fine-scale functional correlation of striate cortex in sighted and blind people.
abstract: To what extent are spontaneous neural signals within striate cortex organized by vision? We examined the fine-scale pattern of striate cortex correlations within and between hemispheres in rest-state BOLD fMRI data from sighted and blind people. In the sighted, we find that corticocortico correlation is well modeled as a Gaussian point-spread function across millimeters of striate cortical surface, rather than degrees of visual angle. Blindness produces a subtle change in the pattern of fine-scale striate correlations between hemispheres. Across participants blind before the age of 18, the degree of pattern alteration covaries with the strength of long-range correlation between left striate cortex and Broca's area. This suggests that early blindness exchanges local, vision-driven pattern synchrony of the striate cortices for long-range functional correlations potentially related to cross-modal representation.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Neurology and Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104.
authors.forename: Omar H
authors.initials: OH
authors.lastname: Butt
authors.forename: Noah C
authors.initials: NC
authors.lastname: Benson
authors.forename: Ritobrato
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Datta
authors.forename: Geoffrey K
authors.initials: GK
authors.lastname: Aguirre
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001766:Blindness / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000503:physiopathology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055815:Young Adult